Category: news

The Queen has spent her final night of her visit to the Republic of Ireland being entertained by X Factor finalist Mary Byrne and the cast of Riverdance.

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A US governor has signed a bill requiring a French railway company to disclose its role in the Holocaust if it is to win state contracts.

Martin O’Malley of Maryland signed a bill aimed at Keolis, a Paris company owned by French national railways SNCF.

The company had bid to operate commuter trains in the state of Maryland.

Historians say SNCF moved 76,000 Jews to Nazi camps during the Holocaust. The laws’ supporters say it will force disclosure of war records.

“We hope this legislation can become a national model sooner rather than later so that Holocaust survivors who are still with us can know that the atrocities inflicted upon their families and their people will remain in our minds, will never be forgotten and will never be repeated,” Mr O’Malley said on Thursday.

According to the bill, the first of its kind passed in the US, companies that were involved in the deportation of Holocaust victims that seek contracts with Maryland’s commuter rail system would have to make company records pertaining to their role available online to the public.

The company records required to be disclosed include internal memoranda, receipts, invoices, audits and correspondence.

In addition, the companies would have to provide an account of property confiscated from Holocaust victims and an account of restitution paid.

The bill is specifically aimed at an American arm of Keolis, a Paris-based company whose majority shareholder is French railroad Societe National de Chemins de Fer, or SNCF.

Keolis had submitted a bid to provide commuter rail service along two lines in Maryland.

Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz, 90, pushed for the legislation and attended the bill signing ceremony.

“It’s a beginning,” said Mr Bretholz, who escaped from an SNCF train wagon en route to the Auschwitz concentration camp. “The other states will probably take note and perhaps do the same thing. We need contrition. We need statements. We need the truth.”

In January, SNCF chairman Guillaume Pepy apologised to Holocaust victim’s on the company’s behalf.

But some French historians have said the company, an arm of the French state, was forced into its role in the Holocaust by the German occupation force.

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Final results in Ecuador’s referendum show President Correa has won backing for his reform programme, including greater control over the media and courts.

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The Magazine’s weekly quiz of the news, 7 days 7 questions

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An Amazon tribe lack an abstract concept of time, as well as linguistic structures that equate time and space which once were thought to be universal.

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A former teammate of cyclist Lance Armstrong has said the seven-time Tour de France winner used the performance-enhancing drug EPO.

Tyler Hamilton rode with Armstrong in the US Postal team, and says both men used EPO during the 1999 Tour.

Lance Armstrong, who has always denied such claims , said on his Twitter page: “Never a failed test. I rest my case.”

Hamilton served a two-year ban for blood-doping from 2005-2007.

“I saw [EPO] in his refrigerator. … I saw him inject it more than one time,” Hamilton told the CBS programme 60 Minutes, “like we all did. Like I did, many, many times.”

Allegations of the use of banned substances by members of the US Postal team are still the subject of an federal investigation in the United States.

Armstrong has always vehemently denied that he ever used banned substances and he has never failed a drugs test.

He won the Tour de France for seven consecutive years from 1999-2005.

He returned to ride in the 2009 race, but earlier this year the 39-year-old announced that he has retired from competitive cycling for good.

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The first service that allows users to pay for purchases via their mobile phone has been launched in the UK.

Among shops signed up to the system are McDonalds, EAT, Pret-a-Manger and some Boots stores.

Users wishing to use the system – dubbed Quick Tap – will need Orange and Barclaycard accounts as well as a handset set up for contactless payments.

The idea of the mobile wallet is gaining popularity around Europe.

The service is made possible by Near Field Communication (NFC), the short-range wireless technology that underpins many wireless payment systems.

Quick Tap is a collaboration between Orange and Barclaycard. It will require a NFC-enabled Samsung Tocco Lite handset, which also goes on sale on Friday.

Only purchases up to a value of £15 can be made using the service but users can preload their mobile with up to £100.

“Having a wallet on my phone has made it much more convenient to make purchases on the move and I like that it allows me to keep track of what I’m spending as I go,” said David Chan, chief executive of Barclaycard Consumer.

“It is going to start a revolution in the way we pay for things on the high street,” added Pippa Dunn, vice president of Orange.

Other stores signed up the service include Subway, Little Chef, Wilkinson and the National Trust.

Later this summer, users will also be able to use the service to pay the toll on the M6 motorway.

Giles Ubaghs, an analyst with Datamonitor, thinks take-up may be sluggish.

“It is an important first step but I think there could be a lack of incentive. Early adopters may like it for the novelty value but the majority just won’t see the point,” he said.

Mobile wallet services have been available in Japan for some years and operator DoCoMo NTT spent a good deal of cash getting them up and running.

“They even had to buy a convenience store chain to get the readers in there but all the evidence is that people don’t use it that often. Only around 10% seem to use the NFC functionality on their phones,” said Mr Ubaghs.

Mobile couponing, where people can swipe their handsets in order to get discounts on goods, could kickstart NFC technology, he thinks.

Or it could find popularity in the future as an alternative to Bluetooth.

“It may be used for swapping data from phone to phone or for, say, taking pictures from a phone and putting them on a TV,” he said.

Nokia is believed to be bringing out an NFC-enabled version of the popular game Angry Birds later this year.

In 2009 O2 trialled contactless payments, using mobiles in place of the popular Oyster card which allows commuters to pay for their tube journeys.

It has said it will launch its mobile wallet service later this year.

By the time of the Olympics it is expected that transactions, transport and tickets will all be available via contactless technology.

Currently there are 50,000 stores with NFC-enabled readers in the UK.

Some 12.9 million credit and debit cards are already in circulation.

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Schools in England should do more to help children of parents serving in the armed forces, Ofsted has said.

A report by the education watchdog says while forces children generally do as well as other pupils, frequent school moves can have an adverse effect.

It says exam results can suffer and the uncertainty of having parents in conflict zones can lead to social and emotional problems for some children.

The government says it is providing cash to help schools tackle the issues.

It is allocating a £200-per-pupil premium to provide pastoral assistance and a £3m fund to help mitigate potential problems in schools with high numbers of services children.

Ofsted’s report was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence to identify where support for service children could be improved.

Overall, forces pupils tend to do as well, if not better than the national average, but where there are high levels of mobility, performance is not so good, says Ofsted.

There was a clear recognition that the mobility associated with service life can have a detrimental effect on children, the report said.

This was particularly so when moves took place during GCSE years and could have a big impact on pupils’ results.

It added that continual moves had a negative effect on these youngsters’ friendships and their personal development, and they often had “gaps” in their education and needed help to catch up.

“The combination of deployment of a family member and regular moves of home and school can cause anxiety and stress for service families whether living in the UK or overseas: education is disturbed, social networks are disrupted and parents left behind have to cope with the effects of being a ‘single parent’,” the report added.

And it pointed out that schools reported an increase in the number of problems related to the social and emotional welfare of service children. This had led to a need for extra school-based counselling.

One pupil told inspectors he missed a “male presence” in the house and that he still worried about his father’s placement in Iraq even though it was several years ago.

At another school, children were regularly heard to say: “Four more sleeps until Daddy is home!”

Chief inspector Christine Gilbert said: “Service children often attend many different schools over the course of their school life. This makes continuity and progression in learning hard to achieve, and there is more we should be doing.”

She added that information about each child’s progress should be passed effectively from school to school to ensure their development and learning was as good as it could be.

“Service children are missing large parts of their curriculum and essential training in key areas, and they struggle to catch up. This is made all the harder for them given the anxieties about their parents when on active service.”

The report called for the Ministry of Defence to keep a register of service children and young people in education and to allow greater flexibility in relation to movement dates for families of serving personnel.

It called on schools to be aware of the distinct needs of service children and to make any provision necessary for them. They should also improve the system for transferring children’s records from one school to another when they move.

A government spokesman said the Department for Education did record numbers of service children in England’s state schools but the list was not exhaustive.

He added: “Parents cannot be compelled to record their children as service children, and some prefer not to for fear of being treated differently.”

The spokesman said: “Our servicemen and women risk their lives for this country and it is a key part of the Armed Forces Covenant that we support their families.

“The attainment by service children is, on average, above their peers, but they face the unique challenges and stresses, and that is why the government is providing a £200-per-pupil premium to help provide pastoral assistance for them.”

He said the covenant also included a £3m fund to help mitigate potential problems that schools with high numbers of service children might experience.

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Crossing your arms across your body after injury to the hand could relieve pain, researchers suggest.

The University College London team, writing in the journal Pain, say the brain gets confused over where pain has occurred.

They suggest this is because putting hands on the “wrong” sides of the body disrupts sensory perception.

Pain experts say finding ways of confusing the brain is the focus of many studies.

In a small proof-of-concept study of 20 people, the team used a laser to generate a four millisecond pin-prick of pain to participants’ hands, without touching them.

Each person ranked the intensity of the pain they felt, and their electrical brain responses were also measured using electroencephalography (EEG).

The results from both participants’ reports and the EEG showed that the perception of pain was weaker when the arms were crossed over the “midline” – an imaginary line running vertically down the centre of the body.

Dr Giandomenico Iannetti, from the UCL department of physiology, pharmacology and neuroscience, who led the research, said: “In everyday life you mostly use your left hand to touch things on the left side of the world, and your right hand for the right side of the world.

“This means that the areas of the brain that contain the map of the right body and the map of right external space are usually activated together, leading to highly effective processing of sensory stimuli.

“When you cross your arms these maps are not activated together anymore, leading to less effective brain processing of sensory stimuli, including pain, being perceived as weaker.”

He said the discovery could potentially lead to new ways of treating pain that exploit this confusion.

Dr Iannetti he added: “Perhaps when we get hurt, we should not only ‘rub it better’ but also cross our arms.”

His team, alongside Australian researchers, are now testing the theory on patients who have chronic pain conditions.

A spokesman for the Pain Relief Foundation said a lot of research into relieving chronic pain was looking into ways of confusing the brain and disrupting pain messages.

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A dietary supplement given to pregnant women at high risk of pre-eclampsia can reduce the likelihood of the disease occurring, a study says.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, researchers says the presence of an amino acid and antioxidant vitamins in the supplement helps to combat abnormally high blood pressure.

More than 600 women took part in the study in Mexico City.

But experts say more research is needed on the effects of the supplement.

Pre-eclampsia is a serious condition where abnormally high blood pressure and other problems develop during pregnancy.

It affects up to 10% of all first-time pregnancies and is dangerous for both mother and child.

Pre-eclampsia is thought to be linked to a deficiency in L-arginine, an amino acid that helps maintain a healthy blood flow.

So, as part of their study in the British Medical Journal, researchers in Mexico and the United States gave 228 pregnant women at high risk of pre-eclampsia daily food bars containing L-arginine and antioxidant vitamins.

Another 222 pregnant women received bars containing only vitamins, and another group of 222 got bars containing no L-arginine or vitamins, the placebo group.

The supplements began when women were 20 weeks pregnant and continued until they gave birth.

The research team found that 30.2% of women developed pre-eclampsia in the placebo group, 22.5% in the group given a vitamin bar and 12.7% in the L-arginine and vitamin group.

The study authors said the L-arginine and vitamin group women were significantly less likely to develop pre-eclampsia.

“This relatively simple and low cost intervention may have value in reducing the risk of pre-eclampsia and associated preterm birth,” they said.

But they added that further studies are needed to see whether the results can be repeated.

Gail Johnson, midwife teacher at the Royal College of Midwives, cautioned that it was a relatively small study which excluded some high-risk groups.

“It’s a starting point for looking at pre-eclampsia, which poses a significant health risk and is an important thing to solve, but there are lots of questions still to be asked about the effects of the supplement.”

Andrew Shennan, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at St Thomas’ Hospital, said there were established scientific reasons why L-arginine and antioxidants reduce the occurrence of pre-eclampsia.

“Previous studies, testing each supplement individually, have shown little effect, so it is exciting that in combination they seem to have such a profound effect on preventing pre-eclampsia.”

“However, it is unusual that so many people in the control group developed pre-eclampsia – 30% is an unusually high rate of incidence of the disease so I would be interested to see if the effects of the study could be replicated elsewhere.”

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The UK Border Agency (UKBA) has been criticised in a report examining its operations in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Independent inspector John Vine said he was concerned at how it operated at major ports and airports.

He found senior managers focused on moving staff to passport control, potentially at the expense of detecting drugs and other illicit goods.

He also said it had not assessed the threat to small ports and airports.

The UKBA is responsible for controlling immigration, asylum and customs regulations.

In his review, Mr Vine pointed out there had been no seizures from freight containers for more than 14 months.

And he expressed concern there had been no assessment of the threat posed at small air and sea ports for three years.

The chief inspector also identified problems in the way the agency managed the risks associated with people landing in the Irish Republic and travelling on to the UK.

He said they were operating on intelligence which was more than two years old.

The inspection of border operations took place between 1 November 2010 and 10 January 2011.

It focused on the deployment of detection staff to air and seaports, the risk assessment of small ports, the selection of people, vehicles and freight for searching and the treatment of passengers by agency officers.

Mr Vine said he was pleased to find frontline officers demonstrated a commitment to identifying and seizing illicit commodities, sharing information on trends and using local knowledge to good effect.

But he went on to say: “I found that the focus of staff deployment at airports was concentrated on the primary checkpoint (passport control), potentially at the expense of illicit commodity detection.

“I found that only 63 out of 683 threat assessments of small air and seaports had been conducted in the whole of Scotland and Northern Ireland, with none since 2008.

“At the ports inspected, I was surprised to find that the agency had not made any seizures from freight containers for the 14-month period between the end of September 2009 and our inspection in November 2010.”

He added: “The agency needs to improve the way it identifies and addresses threats to the UK border in Scotland and Northern Ireland. I have made seven recommendations to this effect.”

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Selecting a potential father for your children, it turns out, is not unlike shopping online.

“A lot of our clients typically want their donor to be at least 180cm [5ft 11in] tall and have blue eyes,” says Peter Bower, director of Nordic Cryobank, who is showing me his database of sperm donors.

Customers narrow their computer search to eliminate men who are under or over a certain weight in kilos.

They can click on a candidate’s profile and, for a fee, download an audio interview and a photograph of him as a baby.

Staff also provide a few sentences giving their impression of donors – a physical description or an illuminating detail, Mr Bower says, such as “that he enjoys chatting in the lab after he has donated, dresses nicely or is very interested in a particular sort of music”.

But crucially, none of the information will identify an individual, unless he has chosen to be traceable.

In Denmark, sperm donation does not have to come with a name and telephone number – unlike in Britain and in a fast-increasing number of other European countries.

That has made Denmark something of a Mecca for foreign women who want to conceive by artificial insemination, because it has no shortage of officially screened and tested semen.

Danish clinics which provide insemination (often for a fraction of the price of similar treatment in the UK) have three main types of customer: lesbian couples, heterosexual couples and single women. It is the final category which is growing – by far – the fastest.

Peter Bower says single British women are “at the forefront” in choosing this service, but foreign uptake in general is booming. According to the latest figures from the Danish Department of Health, in 2008 2,694 non-Danish women came to Aarhus and Copenhagen for insemination, while in 2010 that number leapt to 4,665.

Samples are delivered from the sperm bank to the aptly-named Stork Klinik, across Copenhagen, in the industry’s latest gimmick; a bicycle in the shape of a single sperm cell. Deep-frozen in liquid nitrogen, the samples are stored in the spherical head of the sperm, just in front of the handlebars.

Lilian Joergensen is the nurse in charge at the clinic, where women come to be inseminated.

The premises are the epitome of Scandinavian design chic.

“We want the women to feel like queens,” she says, pointing to a small wooden crown on the wall above the bed where the insemination is done.

“We hope to create a tranquil atmosphere that will give people a good memory of the place where their baby’s story began. Some days we might have 17 inseminations but it’s very important to have the same time and attention for every woman.

“We hear her history, her problems, take her mood into account. She must not be a number in a system. She comes here, uses this room as her own, brings a friend, brings candles, whatever she wants.”

In their home in New Malden in south London, Kellie Lombard and her partner bear witness to the success of the Danish approach.

Ms Lombard had several expensive but unsuccessful attempts to conceive by sperm donor in Britain and one in South Africa.

She and her partner found out about the Danish option on the internet and now have a thriving family consisting of two “mothers”, identical twin boys who are nearly five months old, and a girl of two, all fathered by the same anonymous Danish man.

Ms Lombard jokes about the criteria on which their choice of father was based.

“We were originally looking for David Beckham,” she says, “but we also wanted someone with lots of academic qualifications.”

In fact, they know a surprising amount about the man who is their children’s biological father: his age, weight, the fact that he is a medical student, and what he looks like.

Most intriguingly for them, they know what he sounds like as an audio recording was available of him explaining why he was donating – his principle motivation was money – and they thought he sounded like a nice person.

They have now bought up the full legal UK allocation of his sperm. Only a very small number of donations per man are allowed in each country, to limit the chances of half-siblings unknowingly pairing in future.

Ms Lombard’s family is an unusual one, she admits. When she takes her extremely Scandinavian-looking daughter to the park, people often ask whether her “daddy” is very tall. Ms Lombard just replies that he is – 6ft 4in, in fact.

If this new European trend in insemination continues, Nordic genes could become more widespread than many would suspect.

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A US man who was paralysed from the chest down after being hit by a car is now able to stand with electrical stimulation of his spinal cord.

Rob Summers, from Oregon, said standing on his own was “the most amazing feeling”.

He can voluntarily move his toes, hips, knees and ankles and also walk on a treadmill while being supported, according to research in the Lancet.

However, a UK expert said this should not be interpreted as a cure.

Rob was a keen baseball player and in 2006 was part of the team which won the College World Series.

But in that summer he was injured in a hit and run accident and his spinal cord was damaged.

Messages from the brain, which used to travel down the spinal cord, were blocked and he was paralysed.

Doctors surgically implanted 16 electrodes into his spine.

Rob trained daily in trying to stand, walk and move his legs, while electrical pulses were sent to the spinal cord.

Within days he was able to stand independently and eventually he could control his legs and step, with assistance, for short periods of time.

“None of us believed it,” said Professor Reggie Edgerton, from the University of California. “I was afraid to believe it.”

Rob has also regained other functions such as bladder, bowel and blood pressure control.

He said it had been a “long journey of countless hours of training” which had “completely changed my life”.

He added: “For someone who for four years was unable to even move a toe, to have the freedom and ability to stand on my own is the most amazing feeling.”

This study has proved that electrical stimulation works in one person. Four more patients are being lined up to further test the treatment.

Professor Geoffrey Raisman, from the Institute of Neurology at UCL, said: “This one case is interesting, and from one of the leading groups in the world. To what extent this procedure could in the future provide a further and sustained improvement cannot be judged on the basis of one patient.

“From the point of view of people currently suffering from spinal cord injury, future trials of this procedure could add one more approach to getting some benefit. It is not and does not claim to be a cure.”

Dr Melissa Andrews, from the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair, said that while the study was a “little bit mind blowing” people should not say this is a cure.

She added: “I think people need to read this and say the possibility is out there, but it may not come tomorrow. It’s the closest we’ve ever seen and it’s the best hope right now.”

Professor Susan Harkema, who was part of the study at the University of Louisville, said: “It is really critical to be clear that it’s still in a research realm, but stay tuned we’re going to learn a lot more every day.”

For Rob he sees his story as a message of hope to people who are paralysed and as for walking again: “I see it as a major possibility.”

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